Thin Line

By Tim McGivern

Why so angry? Bill Maher weighed in on the debate over Mary Cheney's lesbian lifestyle with words, perhaps, many Americans might find comforting. On his HBO show “Real Time with Bill Maher” last Friday, Maher said: “But my question about that whole flap, that the Republicans are very angry. Dick Cheney said, ’I'm an angry father.' If it's not shameful to be gay, why are their panties in a bunch about this?I mean, they talk about her like she's some retarded monster they have chained in the attic, you know.... And it is an issue. (Bush and Cheney) made it an issue. It's an issue in this election. Don't talk about my daughter who we are trying to discriminate against in a constitutional amendment.”

Help, I'm stoned, who should I vote for? Winning the Ganja vote could be the key to this year's presidential election. Who knows? Yet oddly enough, last week, while John Kerry's press office sent out a long list of newspaper endorsements that the Democrat picked up recently, including the Miami Herald, St. Petersburg Times, St Louis Post Dispatch and New York Times they forgot one other highly influential and, dare I say, mainstream publication that is also supporting Kerry—High Times magazine. The endorsement states: "We think Bush lied about Iraq being a war of last resort, and that's too big a lie to let pass. But first, stop and think about America's other war, the one we're fighting (and losing) in Colombia, the one that targets and arrests cancer patients at gunpoint, the one that's filling our for-profit prisons, the one that's denying first-offense non-violent pot smokers college loans, the one we know to be nothing but a big lie, a lie that's grown bigger and bigger since Nixon first sold it as part of his election campaign in 1968: The War on Drugs. Let's say it plain: The War on Drugs is bullshit. And, to borrow a cliché, now more than ever the War on Drugs is bullshit. Every dollar the Bush administration has spent on television ads blaming pot smokers for 9/11, or paying Tommy Chong's rent, is one less dollar spent to secure a port, put body armor on a soldier, or hunt down Osama Bin Laden. This seems obvious, until you remember that the Drug War is not about reality, and it's not about winning. ..." Oh, and by the way, Kerry for president.

Madrid to replace Ashcroft? US News and World Report, speculating on who will be our next U.S. Attorney General, made eyes roll in New Mexico last week with this sentence: “If Sen. John Kerryprevails, his nominee is thought to be New Mexico Attorney General Patricia Madrid—who, being Hispanic and female, would give Kerry a twofer.”